At the next travel industry function you attend, whether local, regional or national, take a look at the person to your left and the person to your right. There is a strong possibility that in two years, one of your three companies will be gone, either absorbed by another agency or shut down.
I made a similar comment at a conference in San Antonio on Sept. 25, 2001. Our contribution to that event was supposed to have been a repeat of a seminar on marketing and supplier co-op arrangements that we had presented in Chicago a few weeks earlier, on Sept. 6. But after 9/11, our industry faced a situation not unlike that which we face now, so my wife, Sherrie, and I instead put together a seminar on dealing with the economic conditions facing us.
Many of the agency owners around the country with whom I've been speaking recently suggest that booking activity has fallen off more in the last two months than it did after 9/11. For more than a few, the current economic situation is of greater concern if for no other reason than that the effect is global and the timing on recovery is more uncertain.
The message of this column is much akin to the one in San Antonio: There are a lot of ways to avoid being "the one," but waiting for a rescue boat to come along and pick us up isn't one of them.
It doesn't matter if you're a one-person, home-based operation or a multimillion-dollar brick-and-mortar with hundreds of employees; if you're an agency owner, you already know about taking risks, and you know at some visceral level that something needs to be done.
If you're an owner or employee, now would be a good time to determine what you can do proactively to make sure your agency isn't "the one."
First, if you plan to read beyond this point, I want you to raise your right hand and state out loud, "I will not be the one." Now, tell the person who just looked up to see why you were mumbling to yourself that you'll pass along this column when you're finished.
Now let's go outthink, outplan and outdo.
• Don't stop marketing. My friend David Bohan owns a successful ad agency and writes a nationally recognized column on marketing and marketing innovation. He's pretty much a marketing historian and guru.
One of his columns documents how companies that continue marketing through a downturn like we're in now come out stronger and with increased market share.
Resources might be such that paid advertising isn't an option, but marketing is so much more than paid advertising. Get on the phone to clients. Send them thank-you notes for having done business with you in the past. Get involved (or reinvolved) in civic and social organizations as a guest speaker on travel. Carry business cards wherever you go. Strike up conversations in line at the grocery store with a stranger. Find out what they do. Give them a card. Keep your name in front of as many people as time and budget allow. Touch your clients.
• Network. If you aren't a consortium member, join one now, if for no other reason than to develop a national network of other agents and owners. Start and contribute to discussions on promotions and efforts that are working in your area. Equally important, tell about things that are not working in your area.
• Write a marketing plan. Probably the single biggest shock we have encountered in our surveys is the number of agencies without a marketing plan. A person wouldn't jump in the car and just start driving on a vacation without thinking through where to go or how to get there, or what it was going to cost. Yet nearly 80% of the owners and managers we surveyed over the years did not have a marketing plan. How can a business owner/manager possibly know where the business is going if there is no plan on how to get there, what it will cost and what resources will be needed?
• Give the marketing plan to each of your preferred suppliers. Here's a news flash: Our suppliers need us. Some of them realized it sooner than others; some never forgot. Trust me, they want to be involved with getting your sales up again, but they are not going to hand over their scarce marketing resources to an agency that does not have a plan on how best to use them.
Tell them what you want and what you expect them to do, and then hold them accountable. Avoid being one of the agencies that is waiting for suppliers to come around offering support. It won't happen, because enough owners and managers who read this column will take our recommendations that the suppliers won't have to go looking.
If you would like a copy of David Bohan's article on marketing in down times, send an email to [email protected] and put "Bohan column" in the subject line.
If you would like a copy of our book on writing a business plan, send an email with "Business Plan Book" in the subject line.
If you're committed to not being "the one," I'd really like to hear from you. Send an email and put "I'm not the one" in the subject line.
Oh, and I was wrong in San Antonio. It only took 20 months for 35% of the agencies in existence on Sept. 10, 2001, to disappear.
Charlie and Sherrie Funk are co-owners of Just Cruisin' Plus in Nashville. They have written several books on operating travel agencies and present seminars on travel agency operations throughout North America.